Monday, 21 March 2016

The minor agonies of the whole man-of-principle thing (and refusing to wear wool suits), in an era when being an uncompromising character is considered a bad thing. On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCIn_Xs-VLI

Freelee's Credentials: Half-Truths & Pseudoscience. This one actually contains quite a few digressions (with all due humility) on my own credentials, and on the struggle to make it clear (in newspaper interviews, job interviews, etc.) what exactly your credentials are (and aren't). On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNzElhpjgjQ

Friday, 18 March 2016

The graphic above is a snapshot of air pollution at a particular moment in time: circa 11:30 AM (Beijing time), 17 degrees Celsius in Kunming, in mid-March, 2016.

However, you'll notice that Kunming is actually less polluted than many of the surrounding cities, at least at this moment in time. Remarkably, air-pollution in 西雙版納, 德宏, and many other (small) cities has caught up with Kunming, and has even exceeded it.

I wonder if Kunming has upgraded its power-plants to take some measures to ameliorate air-pollution that haven't yet reached the smaller cities. Those smaller cities are often presented to tourists as offering cleaner air than the regional capital; but, at least for the moment, that seems to be untrue.

Thursday, 17 March 2016

Very few people know me well enough to understand why this video is emotionally moving for me, or what it would mean to me. No, not a few: not even one. Nobody.

In many ways, this period of my life has been consumed by a sort of mourning for my own lost potential, and for the loss of all the years that I committed to gaining expertise I'll never be able to use. But also, on a simple, human level: I care. I didn't care about Laos as an abstraction: I cared about it-and-them in their all-too-human reality.